Lawyerbot takes the drudgery out of law

BEYOND the movies, being a lawyer isn’t all about making grandstanding closing statements that move the jury to tears. The reality for many is hours, days, and sometimes years combing through mind-numbingly dull documents. That might be about to change, as a recent judicial ruling in the US has opened the doors to “predictive coding”. It is a software technique designed to sift through millions of documents and spit out only those the lawyer might need, saving them time and – crucially – their clients’ money.

The system aims to sift millions of e-documents and present only the ones the lawyer might need

“It allows a lawyer to look at a small fraction of a much larger collection of electronic documents,” says Thomas Gricks, a partner at the Schnader law firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Gricks is defending aircraft-hangar operator Landow Aviation against private-jet owners seeking compensation after a roof collapse in 2010. The “legal discovery” part of the case involves examining about 2 million emails and attachments, which Gricks estimates would take 20,000 person hours and so cost &dollar;2 million. Predictive coding lets him review a sample set of just a few thousand documents, marking each as either relevant or non-relevant. This marked set is used to train the software to look for keywords and other linguistic features to find relevant documents, much as email spam filters learn to distinguish scams and adverts from genuine messages.

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Gricks wanted to use predictive coding in the case, saying he expected it would cut the search to just two weeks and 1 per cent of the cost, but was opposed by the plaintiffs’ lawyer, who believed humans would outperform machines. In a landmark ruling, the judge overturned the objection and allowed Gricks to proceed.

“It was the first case in the country, and I think anywhere, where a judge authorised someone to use predictive coding over the objection of the other side,” says Gricks. Another case this year saw both parties and the judge initially agree to use predictive coding, although one of the parties has since changed their mind.

But can software match a search carried out by legal experts? In fact, it seems that computers can actually be much better than humans at reviewing documents. That’s according to a study last year by Maura Grossman, a lawyer at New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and Gordon Cormack of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Both lawyers and software examined a collection of over 800,000 emails and attachments gathered as a result of the collapse of Enron. Predictive coding software was able to match and sometimes beat humans at finding relevant documents, while also being better at avoiding returning irrelevant material. In one case, when asked to flag emails related to document shredding, the human reviewers managed to miss one that said&colon; “I’ll be shredding ‘ till 11am” – but the software caught it (Richmond Journal of Law and Technology, vol 17, issue 3).

“The courts are signalling that if properly implemented and validated, these tools are reasonable and defensible,” says Grossman. “I believe we will begin to see increased acceptance and adoption of technology-assisted approaches.”

But why do lawyers want to reduce legal costs? To attract new clients, says Gricks. “We can try cases that weren’t being tried because it was too expensive to get through discovery.”

When this article was first posted, one of the authors of the study published in the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology was named incorrectly